A History of Britain, Volume 2 (27 page)

But the soldiers who continued to read Lilburne, Overton and Walwyn (and who knows, perhaps Katherine Chidley too) could not wait around for the future. In April a mutiny over pay in London turned into a mass demonstration at the funeral of one of the executed mutineers. In mid-May, another mutiny broke out among some troops passing through the garrison stationed in the staunchly Puritan town of Banbury in Oxfordshire. Two more regiments mutinied near Salisbury and attempted (but failed) to join the Oxfordshire rebels. On 13 May, Cromwell and Fairfax marched a pursuit force 50 miles in a single day, catching the mutineers in the middle of the night at Burford on the edge of the Cotswolds. Seven or eight hundred fled, but 400 were captured of whom four were sentenced to be shot and three were. The next day, Cromwell went off to receive an honorary degree in law from Oxford University. Ringing Leveller statements continued to be published from Bristol before the heavy hand of the army came crashing down again. There was nothing to connect Lilburne directly with the mutiny, but he did his best to remedy that by publishing
An Impeachment of High Treason against Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton
in August. In October, though, it was Lilburne who was tried for treason at the Guildhall in the City of London, where he played brilliantly to the gallery by insisting that the jury alone was empowered to issue a verdict and the judges merely ‘cyphers' of the people's will. It duly acquitted him and Lilburne was freed without conditions, the other three in the Tower following, provided they subscribed to the oath of engagement which the Commonwealth now required of all its citizens. Walwyn, Overton and Prince agreed, but everyone from Cromwell down knew better than to ask John Lilburne.

By the autumn of 1649 it was clear that, whatever else was going to fill the space left by the monarchy, it was not going to be the visionary Commonwealth of the Levellers. Bought off, intimidated or imprisoned, their officers dispersed; the rank and file of regiments thought unreliable were shipped off to Ireland where they could vent their fervour and frustration on the benighted rebels. Their leaders eventually went their
separate ways. The philosophical Walwyn became an amateur authority on matters medical, John Wildman made a packet from speculating in confiscated royalist property, Overton went to France, while Lilburne took up sundry social causes and grievances before being banished for life in 1651. In exile in the Netherlands, he attempted to make sense of what had happened by reading deeply in the classical literature of Roman republicanism: Livy and Sallust. But the texts only seemed to confirm for him the gloomy likelihood of oligarchy or tyranny. Returning to England in 1653 he published again, was imprisoned again and eventually ended up a Quaker.

Leveller fire transmuted into Quaker light is less startling than it might seem, for any number of former political zealots faced with the ferocity of the republic's repression turned to religion in their search for truth and deliverance. And this spiritual migration was not just a matter of consolation for thwarted populists. If Levelling had failed, it had to be because God had willed it so, wanting the brethren to turn aside from the ‘carnal' world and look elsewhere for salvation. Elsewhere meant, first and foremost, within themselves, in the recesses of their being, which had been overlaid by carnal things: appetites, words, ambitions. Buried beneath all that worldly muck were the spotless hearts and souls of the children they remained in their innermost spirit and which, once released from the bondage of the carnal world, could be opened to receive the light of God's grace.

The first apostles of this personal redemption were utterly convinced, even when locked up in the stinking darkness of a dungeon, that they were walking in the time of light. God had willed the terrible wars, not for carnal alterations – a parliament, a republic – but so that the institutions of false authority should fall away. Away had gone bishops. Away had gone presbyteries. What was left was freedom – the precious freedom for them to find their way. In Rome 1650 may have been the Jubilee year, and Pope Innocent X was erecting his own column of light, the obelisk, in the Piazza Navona. But it was an age of miracles for the seekers after grace. For while the Commonwealth and the generals were adamant about the monopoly of armed force and the control of expressly political opinions, they were (especially Cromwell) equally insistent on freedom of conscience for any sect or confession (other than Catholics, naturally) who caused no threat to the public peace. Just what constituted such a threat, of course, was often left to the judgement of local magistrates whose threshold of outrage was often much lower than Cromwell's, as the Quakers in particular were to discover. But this brief period of benign neglect produced the most fertile proliferation of spiritual enthusiasms
since (or for that matter before) the Reformation. Some were organized, like the Baptists, into Churches, but others were frequently no more than cult followings gathered around the personality of charismatic preachers like Abiezer Coppe or the Ranter Laurence Clarkson.

From group to group they differed wildly on, for example, the status of Scripture (some of the Ranters and Quakers thought it no more than an historical document) or the importance of baptism and church marriage (which the Quakers rejected along with any other outward sign of communion). But what they all had in common was an intense aversion to any kind of formal ecclesiastical authority or institutional discipline. Calvinism's dogma of predestination, with its irreversible separation of the elect and the damned, they rejected out of hand as utterly inconsistent with God's love, which could be received by any who opened themselves truly to his grace. The most extreme of their number, such as Laurence Clarkson, taught that, since God was perfect, the idea of sin, and the shame which went with it, must have been a human invention, and to the scandal of other Christians went about conspicuously testing their theory by living openly with a series of concubines. The disregard for formal authority, pushed to its logical extreme and professed by Quakers as well as Ranters, was that God lived in each and every one, and was simply waiting to take possession of the transformed believer.

Separated from the fraudulent and redundant authority of the clergy, salvation could now be a free, voluntary act by anyone old enough to know what she or he was doing (hence the Baptists' refusal to countenance infant baptism). The mere idea of a parish was an arbitrary geographical absurdity, a jurisdictional convenience masquerading as a Church. Why should all the people who happened to live within the same bounded area be supposed, by that fact alone, to be brethren or sisters in Christ? Church buildings themselves the Quakers ridiculed as ‘steeple houses', mere piles of stones built for carnal admiration and which had to be broken up, in spirit if not in fact, before the enslaved flocks could be converted into Children of Light.

The sects satisfied two quite different visions of the imperfect alteration of the state from kingdom to Commonwealth and pointed a way ahead in two quite separate directions. For Fifth Monarchists like John Rogers, Vavasor Powell and Major-General Thomas Harrison, their noses buried in scriptural prophecy, the new, last age had dawned with the beheading of the king. So they were under an obligation not to turn their back on the state but to convert it to the rule of the Saints, and so be in a position to prepare the Commonwealth for the consummation of prophecy. Their soldiers, magistrates and preachers had to infiltrate,
not abandon, the public world, the better to bend it to God's command.

For the Quakers and those who thought like them, this obstinate attachment to carnal affairs was only compounding the problem. Polities were, by their very nature, incapable of spiritual transformation, and hence should simply be shunned, the better to concentrate on what counted – the alteration of individual personalities to fit them for the admission of light. Self-assertion, the quality that made men leaders, had to give way to self-nullification.

Their lives, then, became journeys towards sweet nothingness, which began, necessarily, with an uprooting from familiar habits. When he was barely nineteen, George Fox, a Puritan weaver's son, began his wanderings away from his home in Drayton-in-the-Clay in Leicestershire (much to his father's displeasure). It was 1643 and Fox walked through a landscape torn apart by the war, plodding patiently in his grey leather coat along roads travelled by troopers and munitions wagons. In the garrison town of Newport Pagnell on the Bedfordshire/Buckinghamshire border, he watched Sir Samuel Luke's soldiers rip out statues from the churches and smash them in the streets. And he listened to the ex-tailor and army captain Paul Hobson sermonize the troops, denouncing the vanity of ‘steeple houses' and insisting that a church was but a gathered body of believers. Two years later, while Fox was roaming the orchards in Leicestershire, he began to experience the ‘openings' which exposed him to illumination. By 1649 he was now ready to begin his wanderings in earnest. It helped that he had a modest inheritance from which he could supply his even more modest wants on the road. In Derbyshire villages populated by hungry lead miners, for whom neither king nor parliament had done much, he preached against tithes and approached potential converts, unbidden, to attempt a ‘convincement'. More perilously, he began to disrupt Presbyterian lectures, shouting of the woe to come and the awaiting light.

Soon, Fox was planning his interventions to provoke the maximum attention and became, to the Presbyterians especially, first a nuisance and then an intolerable menace. For his fearless temerity Fox spent months at a time in prison, in the filthiest of conditions. But (just as with Lilburne) his confinement only enhanced his reputation and did nothing at all to quiet him. In fact he began to get attentive visitors. In Derby, where he was sentenced to a six-month spell in 1650, a jailer asked if he might share his cell for a night to listen to Fox's instruction. Irrepressible, Fox moved north to Lancashire and Yorkshire, gathering converts not just from the poor but also from the propertied classes – the wonderfully named high sheriff of Nottingham, John Reckless, and Margaret Fell, the pious wife
of a Lancashire JP, both of whom opened their houses to Fox to use as an asylum and recruiting headquarters. At Wakefield he brought in the ex-weaver and New Model Army quartermaster James Nayler, who was already a gifted preacher and would be for Fox both a blessing and a curse.

The quaking began. Although he used them freely enough to attack ‘sprinkling' and ‘steeple houses', Fox taught his flock to despise and mistrust words; reason was the enemy of the light. When suffused by it, the ‘Children of the Light', as they called themselves, felt a great trembling of the earth as if it was opening like their own souls, and they themselves began to shake and sway and sometimes sing for joy. The community they felt in this state of grace was important, for it insulated them, up to a point, from the very real perils and penalties they faced from the carnal world. For without question the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate after it, felt threatened by the Quakers, notwithstanding their continual protestations of indifference to politics and loyalty to the powers that be. They were somehow deeply offensive. They refused to doff their hats or to be quiet in church. Indeed, they came to church specifically to make an ungodly noise. Fox was punched in York Minster, and in Tickhill, Yorkshire, he was smacked in the face with a Bible, dragged from the church and tossed over a hedge. He was sat in stocks, pilloried, repeatedly arrested and jailed, despite a modicum of protection from John Bradshaw, president of the court that had tried Charles, a Councillor of State and a friend of Margaret's husband Thomas Fell.

Yet he remained indomitable. In the spring of 1652 Fox climbed to the top of Pendle Hill, on the border between west Yorkshire and Lancashire, and beheld, if not the Promised Land, then the green Ribble valley stretching west to the Irish Sea, a whole country waiting to be gathered. ‘I was moved', he wrote, ‘to sound the day of the Lord.' He bathed in the Light.

As far as Thomas Hobbes was concerned light was just a ‘fancy of the mind caused by motion in the brain'. Like everything else in the human world, it was not mystery but matter and capable of explanation by sound reasoning. At the same time that Fox was in the throes of his illuminations,
Leviathan
appeared, its premise being that matters of religion ought to be shunted off into the realm of metaphysical speculation where they belonged. Politics and government could only be decided by hard-headed, unflinching logic. Moral distaste was neither here nor there. Reason demanded submission to whatever sovereign had the capacity of providing peace and law.

When he got back to England in the spring of 1651, Hobbes discovered that, for all the shouting and prating, there were others who
thought very much like himself when it came to the criteria of allegiance. One of them was Marchamont Nedham, the most prolific and ingenious of the parliamentary journalists, whose
Mercurius Britannicus
jousted with its royalist rival
Mercurius Aulicus.
For a brief spell in the late 1640s, Nedham had switched sides. But once the war was over, he reverted to the Commonwealth and was its leading propagandist. Not only did Nedham now subscribe readily to the official ‘Engagement' that the Commonwealth required of all its citizens, he was prepared to develop a public position which might be used to reconcile the countless thousands of royalists in England to accepting the
de facto
power of the Rump Parliament and its government. Nedham started from the same premise as Hobbes: that the paramount reason to institute any government and to accept subjection to it was its power to offer protection to subjects, otherwise prey to anarchy. Nedham's argument, reinforced by Hobbes, replaced the question ‘Is it proper?' with the question ‘Does it work?' And with that apparently simple change in perspective, for better or worse, modern political science was born.